Patriarchal And Virile Themes In The Man Child By James Baldwin

The Man Child, written by James Baldwin, is a story about a child, Eric, who observes the patriarchal mannerism of his father and his father’s life long friend Jamie. While perhaps not a straightforward critique, the story is rather deprecating of the patriarchal and virile themes the story relates. In this essay I attempt to explicate some of these more critical patterns. The father is portrayed as a man worried almost entirely about his property, of which his wife and son are included in his mind. The wife, a character who we can empathizes with far more readily than the father, seems, in the father’s eyes, only to serve the purpose of bearing him more children, or perhaps we might say bearing him more property. In a declaration of ownership the Father says “I made that” referring to the unborn child in his wife’s womb. This idea of ownership appears to be what establishes the hierarchy between the men of the story.
There is a kind of fatalism that the story has, in that, this way of life is inherent in this family. Eric emulates his father “Eric pretended that he was his father and was walking through the fields as he had seen his father walk, looking all calmly, pleased, knowing that everything belonged to him.” The father helps to strengthen the cycle in his dialogue with Eric about his property “When I die it’s going to be yours… When you get to be a big man, like your Papa, you’re going to get married and have children. And all of this is going to be theirs.” Perhaps we can extrapolate from this and suggest that Baldwin was pessimistic about the improvement of this condition in society on the whole. However, a wrench is thrown in the works as Jamie stops the cycle with the apparent murder of Eric. I am not sure I can precisely define what this says about what Baldwin wanted to convey to the reader. I can generalize though and say that it casts this cycle in a particularly negative